These words are more golden than I can tell. They parallel the elevation of Webster, showing the same love for South Carolina and Massachusetts, in the pertinent parts of the reply to Hayne, which since my boyhood I have cherished as a nonpareil. It is cheering to a faithful southerner to receive such sure proof that the day must soon come when all obloquy will be lifted from the fame of Calhoun, Toombs, and Davis. What a grand triumph of contrast, almost surpassing the best achievement of Shakspeare, it will be when some honest Griffith, having shown Webster, Lincoln, and Grant in all the worth which merited their unspeakably happy lot, each radiant with the victor's glory, places opposite the great civic heroes of the southern nation, their due renown at last fitly blazoned. That renown will be that they devoted the very greatest human powers and virtues all their lives, with never remitted effort and spotless fidelity, to save a doomed country,--the imperishable renown of grand failure in a cause which adverse fate cannot keep from being ever dear to all humanity. My last word as to what I have just quoted from the three northern authors is that all of us--and especially the fast widening public of readers--ought to be forever in earnest to applaud such sentiments and chide every manifestation of excessive sectional bias or prejudice from either northerner or southerner. This has been my incessantly kept faith for years. As proof I refer to my article, "The Old and New South," nearly all of it written in the early part of 1875--thirty years ago--and which I published the next year. I give an exact copy of it in the Appendix. As you go through it remember these things of the author: The election of Lincoln made me believe, as it did thousands of other southerners, that secession was the only patriotic course. I therefore voted for secession delegates to the State convention. I served in the confederate army all the war, taking part in the First Manassas and many other battles; and when I had been surrendered and paroled at Appomattox I walked back to my home in Georgia. Ten years after this I had found full solace and comfort for the direful event to the south of the brothers' war; and I had learned that the brothers on each side had complete justification in conscience for their contrary parts as statesmen, public leaders, voters, and at the end as soldiers. I want my readers of each section to see that I have long practised what I am now preaching.